Paula Ladenburg Land - Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook

The dreaded content inventory and audit

To many of us, they are unnerving a bit like a visit to the dentist. We know regular check-ups are important, but fear the outcome. Maybe we will have to face painful treatment, return trips and high costs to put things right. Then, before we know it, the next check-up is due and the stressful cycle starts again.

But just as looking after your teeth and consulting a dentist pay off, so do the content inventory and audit. They provide a systematic means to a valuable end and are a vital part of a core content strategy. Done regularly, they lessen the stress, allowing us to catch problems while they are easier to fix.

The rapidly-evolving, multi-disciplinary world of digital communication urgently needs to learn about content auditing to sort itself out. As organizations of all shapes and sizes struggle to work out their publishing guidelines, a massive array of content is being let loose across multiple channels and devices, for widely different purposes and audiences. Keeping track of it, let alone diplomatically evaluating, governing and planning it, is a major challenge.

How can we be sure that we are setting the right standards for our content teams to comply with? Its easy to say that content should meet our organizations business strategy and our audiences needs but often the two are hard to synchronize. The role of the content strategist is to bridge the gap and lead the way ahead.

Just as a single, unified content strategy has many integrated layers, working out a content audit is a highly collaborative task. We need input from a range of stakeholders to shortlist what to check for in different contexts. An audit that addresses all aspects not only results in a better customer experience but commits everyone to maintaining high quality content.

Often people ask: which comes first, the content strategy or content audit? Usually they work hand in hand. Before you start a content inventory or audit, you must know where you want to head strategically. An initial content audit will verify or uncover issues to address in the strategy. Once the strategy is in place, you can design follow-up audits to monitor performance and influence further tactics.

A few years ago, many of us working in the developing discipline of content strategy were anxiously trying to learn from one another how best to go about content inventories and audits. What their full scope was. What worked well. What went wrong. The analytical skills we needed to master. And the lions and tigers we encountered on the way.

Then along came Paula Land a calm, cool, highly experienced voice of reason who methodically drew all the complex strands together, introduced a time-saving toolkit of techniques, and spoke us through them clearly.

Whether you are new to the field, highly experienced, or somewhere in between, you are lucky to have immediate access to Paulas wisdom through this excellent book. She explains the why as well as the what and how of both a content inventory and an audit and gives meticulous, step-by-step guidance to keep you, your organization or clients on a practical analytical track for continuous improvement throughout your content projects.

This is a handbook that removes the dread and leads you confidently ahead, with obvious returns on all your efforts. Keep it close beside you. Im sure you will continue to refer to it for many years to come.

Diana Railton, DRCC
Bath, UK

Bill Gates is neither a content strategist nor a content marketer, but this statement from his 1996 blog post evokes definitions of what we now call content strategy: the analysis and planning related to delivering the right content to the right audience at the right time. Deep. Up-to-date. Those terms imply evaluation against some set of standards to assess depth, currency, relevance, and quality. To determine what is good, we need to know what bad looks like.